NBA: Examining the eligible candidates for the 2020 Hall of Fame class
By John Leat
Taking a look at the recently revealed candidates for the Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2020. Which former NBA players should be inducted?
Around this time each year, the powers that be at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame put their heads together to boil the thousands of former NBA players that are eligible for consideration for the Hall of Fame down to a list of 15-20 “eligible candidates” for induction in the upcoming year.
This list will eventually be pared down to the list of finalists, which will then be reduced to the list of players actually inducted. On December 19th, the eligible candidates for induction in 2020 were announced, and today, I will break down the ones from the North American Committee into categories based on their chances for induction
The Locks
No one in their right mind will deny that Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Kevin
Garnett are stone-cold, first-ballot locks for the Hall of Fame. They are all perennial All-Stars with MVP trophies and NBA championship rings on their resumes, and they are going to be in the Hall of Fame at this time next year.
The only name on this list with which some may quibble is Chris Bosh. He only made
one All-NBA team, and he never even sniffed an MVP award. However, he was an 11-time All-Star and a 2-time NBA champion. He’s going into the Hall of Fame, and he’s almost assuredly going in on the first ballot. That decision may not be popular with everyone, but based on the past voting habits of the Hall of Fame committee, it will happen.
Deserve Strong Consideration
Chauncey Billups is the only eligible Finals MVP that does not fit into the “lock” category. In fact, he is one of only two players (the other being Cedric Maxwell) to have previously been eligible that has won a Finals MVP and has not been inducted. Unlike Cedric Maxwell, however, he made five All-Star teams and was selected to three All-NBA teams. He should be in the Hall of Fame, and he likely will get there; it just may not be this year.
Tim Hardaway, the author of the “UTEP Two-Step” crossover move, has become one of the more underrated stars of the 1990s NBA. He made five All-Star teams and five All-NBA teams, including a first-team appearance in 1997. Perhaps his homophobic remarks from several years ago have hurt his chances of induction, but he has gone to great lengths to educate himself on the issue and to work with the LGBT+ community. If you are willing to look past his hateful remarks from the past, he certainly has a basketball resume that is deserving of a strong Hall of Fame consideration.
Marques Johnson has been a somewhat forgotten star from the late 1970s and into the 1980s. He had a very solid NBA career, highlighted by five All-Star selections and three All-NBA nods, including a first-team nod in 1979, and he also had a terrific collegiate career. He won a national championship and was named national player of the year during his time as a UCLA Bruin, and he has since been inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. The combination of his excellent collegiate career and his terrific NBA career should probably be enough to get him into the Hall of Fame, and hopefully, this year can be his year.
If you’ve ever perused the annals of NBA Reddit’s Hall of Fame discussions, you’ll see that there’s one player whose heretofore exclusion from the Hall has created an exceptionally large uproar: Ben Wallace. Let me preface what I’m about to say by clarifying that Ben Wallace should absolutely be a Hall of Famer. He is one of the greatest defensive players to ever lace them up, and he was arguably the most important player on perhaps the most unlikely NBA championship team of all time.
With that being said, he is also one of the worst offensive players ever. To reference Moneyball, there are good offensive players, and there are bad offensive players. Then, there are 50 feet of crap…and then there’s Ben Wallace. He never once exceeded 10 PPG in a season. He never cracked 50 percent shooting from the free-throw line for a season, and his career field goal percentage is a frigid (for a big man attempting only five shots per game for his career) 47.4 percent.
For comparison, another “all defense, no offense” big man in today’s game, Rudy Gobert, has averaged at least 10 points per game for the past five seasons, has only dipped below 56 percent from the free-throw line during one season in his career (his rookie season), and is a career 63.2 percent shooter from the field.
My point isn’t that a complete lack of an offensive repertoire should disqualify Ben Wallace from consideration for the Hall of Fame, but it also shouldn’t be completely overlooked. Wallace was a great player, but he is no more of a snub than a guy like Chauncey Billups or the next player on this list.
Chris Webber was one of the true stars of the early 2000s as the best player on those consistently contending Kings teams. His resume, in some ways, mirrors that of Tim Hardaway; both made five All-Star teams and five All-NBA teams, and both received a single first-team nod, with Webber’s coming in 2001.
One can’t help but wonder how differently Webber’s career might be perceived had that controversial Game 6 against the Lakers in the 2002 Western Conference Finals gone differently. If the result of that game is different, the Kings reach the Finals, where they likely defeat the New Jersey Nets, cementing Webber’s place in the Hall of Fame as the best player on a championship team. Alas, that’s not the way things played out, but Webber is still arguably the best player to have previously been eligible that is not yet in the Hall of Fame.
Perhaps the weakest of the names that I have dubbed as deserving of strong consideration is Shawn Marion. From a quick peek at his individual resume (4-time All-Star, 2-time All-NBA third team), Marion does not have the traditional Hall of Fame accolades. However, he was a key part of the Mavericks title run in 2011, an underrated part of the Suns’ revolutionary mid-decade success, and an advanced stats darling. He is the type of switchable, versatile, low-usage player that just about every team in today’s game would love to have. He was a truly uniquely impactful player, but perhaps he came along 10-15 years too soon to have his impact properly recognized.
Really Good Players, but Not Hall-of-Famers
Richard Hamilton is the third eligible candidate from that 2004 Detroit Pistons championship team and perhaps the player from this category with the best argument to be moved up into the previous category. He was a three-time All-Star who won a championship in the NBA and in college (where he was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four). He was a really good player, but his career falls just outside of the realm of true Hall of Fame territory.
Buck Williams had a very nice career for himself with the New Jersey Nets in the 1980s. He was a three-time All-Star, and he was named to a second-team All-NBA once in his career. As I said, that is a very nice career, but it is very likely not a Hall of Fame career.
There is an argument to be made in favor of Mark Jackson’s induction to the Hall of Fame. He is 4th all-time in assists, and everyone else in the top 10 is a surefire Hall of Famer. However, Jackson was only an All-Star during one season in his career. He was a compiler that was pretty good for a really long time, which is impressive and deserves recognition, but he never really approached the peak that most Hall of Famers has reached.
Michael Finley was an excellent player for the Mavericks around the turn of the century, making the All-Star team in 2000 and 2001, before being a key contributor to the 2007 Spurs team that won a championship. That said, he would be the Harold Baines of the Basketball Hall of Fame (as in, he would generate a lot of “well if Michael Finley is in, why can’t David West or Jerry Stackhouse or Eddie Jones be in?” conversations), so he likely won’t have a chance.
Dale Ellis would be a similarly Baines-like choice for the Basketball Hall of Fame. He made just one All-Star team and 1 All-NBA third team for the Sonics in the late 1980s, so his accomplishments are well below those of the average Hall of Famer.
Mark Eaton and Marcus Camby have very similar cases for the Hall of Fame. Both were preternatural shot-blockers that won Defensive Player of the Year (once for Camby, twice for Eaton), so they deserve perhaps a passing glance of Hall of Fame consideration, but have done little else in their careers, they are not deserving of serious consideration.
Confusing Inclusions at First Glance
- Muggsy Bogues
- LaMont Robinson
If you’ve read my article covering Isaiah Thomas’s potential shot at the Hall of Fame, the inclusion of Muggsy Bogues on this list should not come as that much of a surprise. The Hall of Fame has exhibited noticeable leniency when evaluating the careers of former NBA players under 5-foot-10.
Muggsy Bogues was a terrific role player for a long time in the NBA. That is a tremendous accomplishment for anyone standing at 5-foot-3 like Bogues, but without grading on a height-based curve, it is not anything resembling a Hall of Fame career. I would not take issue with Muggsy Bogues making the Hall of Fame, but based purely on his statistical accomplishments, it would be one of the more perplexing inclusions.
I pride myself as someone with a relatively solid grasp on the history of basketball, but I am not ashamed to admit that I had no idea who LaMont Robinson was before seeing his name on this list.
It was difficult to even find him through a Google search. A search for just “Lamont Robinson” brings up an Illinois politician of the same name. The next logical step was to search “Lamont Robinson basketball,” which brought up Lamont “Junior” Robinson, a former Mount St. Mary’s basketball player, currently playing professionally in Spain.
It wasn’t until I searched “Lamont Robinson Hall of Fame” that I actually found LaMont “Showboat” Robinson, who is the LaMont Robinson that is nominated for the Hall of Fame this year. He never played in the NBA, but he has played professionally in one form or another since 1987, and he is the founder of the Harlem Clowns, a comedy-style basketball organization in a similar vein as the Harlem Globetrotters.
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His inclusion on this list is very interesting, and perhaps he does deserve consideration for his contributions to the growth of the game, but to honor someone who can barely even be found through a Google search before honoring former NBA greats like Chris Webber and Chauncey Billups would be a questionable decision at best.